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Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Where are they now No 7

My latest contribution to Total Politics magazine's Where Are They Now? series can now be found online here.

Its subject, Phillip Oppenheim, is probably my favourite-ever Tory politician. Despite coming from a fairly wealthy background, he was as at home in The Spanker, Nether Heage, in his Amber Valley constituency, as he was at Annabels' nightclub. I've enjoyed a drink with him in both venues.

We first got to know eachother in Derbyshire in the late 80s when I was working for the Derby Evening Telegraph and when I arrived in the Lobby several years later he continued to be helpful to me even though he had no particular career interest in being so. He may have forgotten that, but I haven't.

As my TP piece makes clear, Phillip has now clearly moved on from the loss of his seat and forged a new and perhaps more interesting career outside Westminster.

"He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change."

Denis Healey, writing about Roy Jenkins in "The Time of My Life."

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with a series of far-fetched resolutions, and these are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code. And you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'll tell you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's homes and with people's services."

Neil Kinnock, Bournemouth 1985

"But the most eloquent message concerns the Blair government. It must be right at all times. Above all, the integrity of the leader can never be challenged. He never did hype up intelligence. He didn't take Britain to war on any other than the stated terms. Any suggestion of half-truth, or disguised intention, or concealed Bushite promises is the most disgraceful imaginable charge that deserves a state response that knows no limit.

"That's how a sideshow came to take over national life. Now it seems to have taken a wretched, guiltless man's life with it. Such is the dynamic that can be unleashed by a leader who believes his own reputation to be the core value his country must defend."

Hugo Young, on the death of Dr David Kelly, 2003

"The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life."